Tagged: post-racial liberalism
“Senate Republicans revealed this week that they have eliminated the phrase ‘civil rights and human rights’ from the title of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee charged with overseeing those issues. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee this month and announced the members of the six subcommittees this week. With Grassley’s announcement, the subcommittee formerly known as the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights suddenly became the Subcommittee on the Constitution. The new chairman of the newly named subcommittee is Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). His office confirmed that it made the switch.”
I wonder how many people of color sit on this committee. This is not a good thing for African Americans since racism and racial inequality is worsening by the day in the United States of America. It’s the original version of the Constitution that they worship, the one in which blacks were considered three-fifths of a person because, we weren’t….human….and had no rights — civil, social, political or any other type of right that one could think of — to which they had to respect. If they are making decisions like this, it’s clear that many in Congress don’t think racism exists and/or that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 needs to be amended and strengthened if companies like William Morris Endeavor Entertainment (formerly known as the William Morris Agency) can intentionally maintain employment practices, policies and procedures that exclude qualified African Americans from meaningful positions and/or profit immensely by using their control over Hollywood to project the myth of black inferiority onto the conscience of the world.
I guess one could also argue, why does it matter since if committee hasn’t really done anything to eradicate institutionalized racism since it was created. No matter how you look at it, this is not a good thing for African Americans and there probably won’t be another president of color for a veeerrry long time… As stated earlier this week, it’s time that we start thinking politically, form our own political party and/or get the fuck out of this country after we collect our #reparations.
Source: Dana Liebelson and Danny J. Reilly. “Senate Republicans Remove ‘Civil and Human Rights’ From Subcommittee Name.” Huffington Post. January 23, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/23/civil-rights_n_6534922.html.
“While the 66 lawyers Reuters identified represented less than one half of 1 percent of all lawyers who petitioned the court during that period, they were involved in 43 percent of the cases the justices heard. An even more elite group — eight lawyers — made almost one of every five arguments the court heard from private attorneys during those years. One of these lawyers, Paul Clement, has argued 75 cases before the court.”
Source: The Editorial Board. “The Best Lawyers Money Can Buy.” New York Times. December 25, 2014. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/26/opinion/the-best-lawyers-money-can-buy.html?_r=0.
election day is TODAY! by 2016, let’s have our OWN political party!!
Find your polling location here: https://2014.votinginfoproject.org/.
Until institutionalized racism and global white supremacy (racism) are eradicated, the talk about America being “post-racial” is nothing more than EMPTY RHETORIC and color-blind public policies will NEVER work for the true benefit of all. In America, we must always be conscious of race and the role that it plays in the allocation of society’s benefits, and its burdens.
15 FACTS which “prove” that AmeriKKKa has NEVER gotten “over racism” and that “post-racial liberalism,” as advocated by President Obama, is NOT the solution to eradicating global white supremacy (racism).
On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, officially banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It also ended racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and in general public facilities. Fifty years removed from that milestone, it’s apparently easy to think that we’re over racism. Here are 15 facts that prove that’s not the case.
1) Affluent blacks and Hispanics still live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes.
An analysis of census data conducted by researchers at Brown University found that income isn’t the main driving factor in the segregation of U.S. cities. “With only one exception (the most affluent Asians), minorities at every income level live in poorer neighborhoods than do whites with comparable incomes,” the researchers found.
2) There’s a big disparity in wealth between white Americans and non-white Americans.
White Americans held more than 88 percent of the country’s wealth in 2010, according to a Demos analysis of Federal Reserve data, though they made up 64 percent of the population. Black Americans held 2.7 percent of the country’s wealth, though they made up 13 percent of the population.
3) The racial wealth gap kept widening well after the Civil Rights era.
It nearly tripled between 1984 and 2009, according to a Brandeis study.
4) The Great Recession didn’t hit everyone equally.
Between 2007 and 2010, Hispanic families’ wealth fell by 44 percent, and black families’ by 31 percent, compared to 11 percent for white families.
5) In the years before the financial crisis, people of color were much more likely to be targeted for subprime loans than their white counterparts, even when they had similar credit scores.
The Center For Responsible Lending came to that conclusion after analyzing government-provided mortgage data for the year 2004, supplemented with information from a propriety subprime loan database.
“For many types of loans, borrowers of color in our database were more than 30 percent more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers, even after accounting for differences in risk,” the authors of the report wrote.
6) Minority borrowers are still more likely to get turned down for conventional mortgage loans than white people with similar credit scores.
An Urban Insititute data analysis found that mortgage denial rates from government-sponsored servicers are higher for black applicants with bad credit than for white applicants with bad credit:
7) Black and Latino students are more likely to attend poorly funded schools.
“A 10 percentage-point increase in the share of nonwhite students in a school is associated with a $75 decrease in per student spending,” a 2012 analysis of Department Education data by the Center For American Progress found.
8) School segregation is still widespread.
80 percent of Latino students attend segregated schools and 43 percent attend intensely segregated schools — ones with only up to 10 percent of white students. 74 percent of black students attend segregated schools, and 38 percent attend intensely segregated schools.
9) As early as preschool, black students are punished more frequently, and more harshly, for misbehaving than their white counterparts.
“Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but 42 percent of the preschool children suspended once, and 48 percent of the preschool children suspended more than once,” a Department of Education report, released in March, noted.
10) Perceptions of the innocence of children are still often racially skewed.
A study published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that participants estimated black boys to be older and less innocent than white boys of the same age.
When participants were told that the boys, both black and white, were suspected of crimes, the disparity in perceptions of age and innocence became more stark:
Separate research by Stanford psychologists suggests that these kinds of racialized perceptions of innocence contribute to non-white juvenile offenders receiving harsher sentences than their white peers.
11) White Americans use drugs more than black Americans, but black people are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites.
This contributes to the fact that 1 in 3 black males born today can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes, based on current incarceration trends.
12) Black men receive prison sentences 19.5 percent longer than those of white men who committed similar crimes, a 2013 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found.
13) A clean record doesn’t protect young black men from discrimination when they’re looking for work.
Young white men with felony convictions are more likely to get called back after a job interview than young black men with similar qualifications and clean records,a 2003 study published in the American Journal of Sociology found.
14) Black job seekers are often turned away by U.S. companies on the assumption that they do drugs.
The presence of drug testing may actually help to correct this and increase black job seekers’ chances, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study released in May.
15) Employers are more likely to turn away job seekers if they have African-American-sounding names.
Applicants with white-sounding names get one callback per 10 resumes sent while those with African-American-sounding names get one callback per 15 resumes, according to a 2003 National Bureau of Economic Research report. “Based on our estimates,” the researchers wrote, “a White name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience.”
Check out the link to see the graphs that accompanied this article. This list is definitely not exhaustive, but it clearly demonstrates that much “progress” hasn’t actually been made, although from the outside looking in, it appears that way. Until we acknowledge and address the role institutionalized forms of racism play in maintaining these various race-based disparities, our nation will never achieve the intended goals of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
the “origins and trajectory” of “post-racial liberalism.”
[The rhetoric of post-racial liberalism] wasn’t something invented by the current President[,] [r]ather, it has its roots in the period immediately following the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s. It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for instance — an advisor to President Johnson before becoming a United States Senator — who first suggested that the nation would do well to engage in “benign neglect” when it came to the issue of race.
According to Moynihan, persistent inequities between whites and blacks could best be addressed by the passage of race-neutral, universal programs to help all in need; that, in addition to focusing on presumed cultural defects in the black community, from single parent families to crime to an inadequate attachment to education and the labor market. While conservatives made some of the same arguments about so-called black cultural pathology during this period, what distinguished post-racial liberalism from the new cultural racism of the right was its stated commitment to reducing racial disparities, albeit by non-racial means.
By the late 1970s, the leading herald of post-racial liberalism was University of Chicago sociologist, William Julius Wilson, an African American scholar (now at Harvard) whose books, The Declining Significance of Race, and later, The Truly Disadvantaged, put forth the two main pillars of post-racial thought. The first of these was that racial inequities were now mostly the result of race-neutral factors like deindustrialization, the mismatch between jobs (increasingly in suburbs) and people of color (who lived mostly in cities), and inadequate investment in education and other public goods. The second pillar of Wilson’s position was the political calculation that white backlash to things like affirmative action now made it necessary to push universal, race-neutral solutions to those problems, rather than race-specific programs and efforts. In short, we needed to talk less about racism, and more about class.
It is this race-neutral approach (which involves both a rhetoric of racial transcendence and a colorblind public policy agenda), which Barack Obama advocated in his best-selling policy book, The Audacity of Hope. And it is this same approach that he endorsed all throughout the campaign for the Presidency, and which he has articulated consistently since winning the election. When asked about persistent health disparities between whites and blacks, for instance, Obama has maintained that universal coverage and making health care more affordable for all is the best way to close those gaps. When asked about the depression-level job situation in communities of color (in which even blacks with college degrees are nearly twice as likely as their white counterparts to be out of work, and college educated Latinos 2/3 more likely than similar whites to be unemployed), Obama has insisted that a “rising tide lifts all boats,” and so the stimulus package and other measures to get the economy “moving again” are the best remedies for the suffering of folks of color.
But as I show in my new book, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity, President Obama and other adherents to the post-racial liberal philosophy are flatly wrong. In fact, not only are they wrong about the ability of “universal” programs to reduce racial disparities in health, income or education; they are also wrong about the political value of race-neutral approaches. At the end of the day, avoiding conversations about race will not boost support for progressive social policy, and may in fact undermine it.
Written in 2010, Tim Wise’s commentary and analysis on this topic was dead on. Having been taught by critical race theorist Derrick Bell at Harvard Law, President Obama knows very well that taking a race-neutral approach in a highly-race conscious society is not the solution to address the racial inequality that pervades all aspects of our society. His choices are very political and well calculated. Of course he doesn’t want to piss off racist whites any more than he’s already have by being a person of color in the White House. Notice that less than a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s passage, many of the so-called “liberals” were advocating that “the nation would do well to engage in ‘benign neglect’ when it came to the issue of race” and basically ignore things such as institutional, systemic and societal forms of racism. 40 years later, they are still trying to do same while still believing in the myth that they are racially superior to blacks and other people of color! Smdh. Unfortunately, this is all happening at the expense of the African American community and it must stop. Many of the gains made during the civil rights movement have been eviscerated and given that we have no real political power in this country, we cannot realistically expect that things will ever get better for us unless we mobilize our efforts and follow in the footsteps of our ancestors. Honestly, based on this country’s history, particularly when it comes to race, I don’t think that there is any person better than Obama or time than now, to address and help eradicate global white/”Jewish”supremacy once and for all.
Me Against Iniquity: Understanding the Complexities of Global White Supremacy (Racism) Through The Eyes of an Unapologetically BLACK Intellectual 